Some researchers wonder if the question of whether tigers lived in Borneo has gotten short shrift from experts who should be paying more attention to local communities.

One recent morning I paid a visit to Iber Djamal, a leader of the Dayak Ngaju indigenous people. He had invited us to see his mandau, a traditional Dayak weapon.

When I saw the mandau, which is a kind of machete, my attention focused not on the blade but on the fangs adorning it.

What surprised me was that they were said to be tiger fangs.

“These are tiger fangs, not leopard fangs,” Iber said. “The fangs that decorate this mandau are from the animals that have been killed by the weapons inherited from my ancestors. Besides tigers, there are crocodiles, bears, leopards and boars.”

What kind of tiger was killed with this mandau?

“A tiger in Kalimantan. It was killed by my ancestor. There used to be tigers in Kalimantan.”

Iber’s explanation certainly differs from the general understanding about tigers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo island.

The present scientific consensus is that no one in Kalimantan has ever found a tiger. Researchers think the only tigers in Indonesia are in Bali (now extinct), Java (thought to be extinct) and Sumatra (only a few hundred left).

Iber said that the tiger — called harimau in Indonesian and haramaung in Dayak Ngaju — was one of the animals most commonly hunted by his ancestors.

“We believe that if a man can hunt and kill a tiger when his wife is pregnant, the child will grow up to be a king or a leader,” he said.

If a mandau is adorned with tiger fangs, it will endow whomever wields it with courage.

“Maybe because they’re worth so much to some people, tigers in Kalimantan have been hunted to extinction,” he said.

He added that if anyone in his tribe ever found a tiger, it wouldn’t be hunted, “because these animals need to be protected.”

Fangs from a tiger or a clouded leopard?

After encountering this phenomenon, I contacted Yoan Dinata, chairperson of Forum HarimauKita, an NGO, about the possibility of a long-lost species of Bornean tiger.

“There is no record or scholarship of tigers ever living in Kalimantan,” Dinata said.

“But there is a possibility that in the past they did live there, because the islands of Java, Sumatra and Borneo were once fused with mainland Southeast Asia.”